Inquiring minds at Albany Medical College played music to a group of unsophisticated rats, who preferred Beethoven’s “Fur Elise” over Miles Davis’s “Four” and preferred silence over any music at all. When they sweetened the deal by adding cocaine to their least preferred options, however, they found that rats would reverse their preferences, even choosing jazz over classical.

In another study published in 2011, the same experimenters supported by the same NIH grants again used Miles Davis” “Four,” but this time exposed rats to methamphetamine to determine the drug’s effects on rats’ learned conditioning.

These studies were supported by two grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. One of the grants was a T32 institutional training grant regarding the pharmacology and neuroscience of drug abuse. At least six pre- and post-doctoral fellows, who could become members of the next generation of animal experimenters, have been trained and supported with this grant.

Albany Medical College defended the studies, which were aimed at learning whether music triggers cravings in drug-addicted animals.

“The ultimate goal of this research is to find medications that can help diminish drug cravings in humans,” said Jeffrey R. Gordon, spokesman for Albany Med.

If you know anything about addiction,you’d know that even the smallest cues which have become associated with drug use can trigger a relapse. Typically these studies are done with simple cues like a tone or light. However that doesn’t really represent the full richness of cues that one might associate with addiction. The real purpose of this study is to examine a more complex cue that would be a better representation of this.

This is nothing more than the ignorant and ill informed opinion of simple minded people, who I’m willing to bet didn’t bother to read beyond the abstract of the research papers.